Semantic interoperability for infectious diseases reporting system

The healthcare setting is multifaceted, comprised of many different components including private, governmental, and regulatory agencies. There is always a necessity of timely and reliable information exchange among these agencies especially on "Infectious Disease" information due to their criticali-ty. The heterogeneity of the systems used by these agencies has led us into designing and developing an interoperable solution to exchange data effectively among several independent yet collaborating health authorities at both state and national levels. This research work articulates the efforts put into achieving an interoperable "Infectious Diseases Reporting System" that incorporates ontology-based semantic rules to align different infectious disease coding standards and to deploy Web services for collecting data from remote sources. This effort is a first step towards achieving a policy-based interoperable Infectious disease monitoring system which can be used across different yet collaborating regulatory agencies.